1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for manufacturing ink jet printed products which are printed by discharging the ink onto printing media such as the cloths made of cotton, silk and others, and printed products obtained using the method. Note that a manufacturing apparatus and method according to the present invention may be used in offices, but is preferably intended for industrial purposes.
Note that the term "print" as used in this specification means the textile printing. Also, the term "coloring matter fixing on to the printing medium" means coloring the printing medium with a coloring matter or dyestuff to the extent not causing substantially any colorless portion by washing.
2. Related Background Art
Conventionally, textile printing apparatuses typically apply the screen textile printing method of using a silk screen plate to make the printing directly onto the cloths. The screen textile printing is a method in which for an original image to be printed, a silk screen plate is first prepared for each color used in that original image, and the ink is directly transferred through silk meshes onto the cloths to effect the coloring.
However, such screen textile printing method has the problem associated therewith that a great number of processes and days are required to fabricate screen plates, and the operations such as the proportion of color inks required for the printing, and the alignment of screen plate for each color, are necessary. Moreover, the apparatus is large in size, and becomes larger in proportion to the number of used colors, requiring a larger installation space, and further the storage space for silk screen plates.
On the other hand, ink jet recording apparatuses have been practically used which have the features of a printer, a copying machine and a facsimile apparatus, or are useful as the output unit of the composite electronic equipment including a computer or a word processor, or the work station, and it has been proposed that such an ink jet recording apparatus is used for the textile printing of discharging the ink directly onto the cloths (for example, Japanese Patent Publication No. 62-57750 and Japanese Patent Publication No. 63-31594).
The ink jet recording apparatus performs recording by discharging the ink from recording means (recording head) onto the recording medium, and has the advantages of easy formation of compact recording means, image recording at high definition and at high speeds, lower running costs and less noise due to non-impact method, and easy recording of color image with multi color inks.
In particular, ink jet recording means (recording head) of discharging the ink by the use of heat energy can be easily fabricated having an arrangement of liquid channels (arrangement of discharge orifices) with high density by forming as films on the substrate electrothermal converters, electrodes, liquid channel walls and a ceiling plate through the semiconductor fabrication processes including etching, vapor deposition and sputtering, thereby allowing for further compact constitution.
Among the ink jet recording apparatuses, a serial type recording apparatus, adopting the serial scan method of scanning in a direction crosswise to the conveying direction (sub-scan direction) of recording medium, repeats a recording operation of recording an image with recording means mounted on a carriage movable in a scan direction along the recording medium, feeding a sheet (pitch conveying) by a predetermined amount in the sub-scan direction after one line of recording, and then, recording the next line of image onto the recording medium as positioned, until the entire recording for the medium is accomplished.
On the other hand, a line type recording apparatus which performs the recording only by sub-scanning in a conveying direction of recording medium repeats an operation of setting the recording medium at a predetermined recording position, performing collectively one line of recording, feeding sheet (pitch feeding) by a predetermined amount, and then, further performing collectively the next line of recording, until the entire recording for the medium is accomplished. Such ink jet recording apparatus using line type recording means with a number of discharge orifices arranged in the sheet width direction allows for high speed recording.
If such ink jet recording apparatus is used for the textile printing, the number of processes and days required for the printing on the cloths can be greatly shortened because of no need for the screen plate for use with the screen textile printing, and the apparatus can be formed in smaller size.
As a result of examinations using the above-cited ink jet recording apparatus for the textile printing to make color printing by discharging a plurality of color inks directly onto the cloths, the present inventors have found that it is requisite to prevent the spreading and blurring of dots to obtain a high quality color image. That is, when a plurality of dots are contiguous or overlap, there was a drawback that a high definition image could not be obtained due to spreading of dots. In particular, image degradation due to blurring may be conspicuous in the color mixed portions or at the connecting portions of serial scan.